We Should Go and Love Ourselves

Aimee Gander
A thirty something, first time mum who likes dogs and writing

This morning as I did my usual Facebook scroll with a cup of tea, I was outraged to read an article about the huge rise in labiaplasty in girls eighteen and under in the last year.

This is not just should I wax or should I not? This is should I pay someone to chop bits of my perfectly fine labia off!

What is happening to society that has meant that in America last year FOUR HUNDRED girls aged eighteen or under, went for very expensive, totally unnecessary surgery on their labia? That is only 4.6% of the EIGHT THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND FOURTY FIVE labiaplasties done in America during 2015. There are statistics that say around 87% of these operations are for purely cosmetics reasons. There are serious risks of scarring, pain and infection.

How have we allowed this to happen?

There is nothing wrong with these women/girls, but a standard introduced to us by porn and the media has lead people to start finding fault with every aspect of their bodies. Most of us don't want our sex life to resemble a porn film.

I have only had a few stitches in my lady garden after the birth of my son. It was the most traumatic part of the childbirth for me, it is one of the things I am most scared of happening when I birth mini person number two later on this year, I can not imagine choosing to have someone take a knife and chop bits off my fanny and sew them up without a real medical need, the recovery must be a living hell.

For those people that lose a body part and want a new one, I am all in favour of this. If you weren't born with the right body parts and need to get yours altered so that you are the correct gender, of course you should do this. If I had had a battle with a life threatening disease and won, I might want to move on by fixing the scars and trying to rebuild a stronger, newer version of myself that I felt confident in. I might not, I might be so happy to be alive and not want to go anywhere near doctors if I didn't have to. I don't know, I am fortunate to not have been in this position in my life so far. For anyone who has, you are amazing, however you want to deal with your recovery is your business and should be supported by everyone.

I am saddened by the rising number of people who feel the need to risk everything for purely cosmetic reasons. We should be educating people more on how brilliant their bodies are, just the way they are. Offering counselling to people with body dysmorphobia to try and help the thing that has gone wrong for them to make them forever unhappy with the body they were given, they have a mental health issue that should be treated. We don't allow people with an eating disorder to starve themselves to death, we step in and try to help, so why are we not trying to help these other people? is it because they pay lots of money into a growing industry that is seen as socially acceptable?

Who decided what they were supposed to look like? Who issued the decree that if you don't have a certain shape/size of labia that there is something wrong with your glorious girl parts?

There is a wonderful artist Jamie McCartney who has created the great wall of vagina, which currently stands at nine metres long and has casts of four hundred vaginas from women of all ages, races and some from transgendered women. We should be encouraging our young women to look at this fantastic wall, so that they can see that we are supposed to come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and that we are all wonderful.

So ladies, please, lets stop this growing trend for chopping up our already perfect parts to try and reach a stupid beauty standard that was made up by idiots. Let's encourage our young women to love themselves regardless of how flappy or not they might be.

If you find yourself entering a new sexy relationship and the person that you are going to do that with decides to change their mind because your labia is not attractive to them, send them on their way. There will be another lover out there who will find it the most erotic thing in the world, it's why we are not all identikit versions of each other, because we all like different things. We are all SUPPOSED to like different things. Embrace yourself for who you are and love yourself.